A reason to believe - 2 views
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They’re finding that religion may, in fact, be a byproduct of the way our brains work, growing from cognitive tendencies to seek order from chaos, to anthropomorphize our environment and to believe the world around us was created for our use.
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“Religion is one of the big ways that human societies have hit on as a solution to induce unrelated individuals to be nice to each other,” says Norenzayan.
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“The problem is, the more you look inward toward your religious group and its claims of virtue, the less you look outward and the more distrustful you are of others,” he says.
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That distrust causes much of the world’s strife and violence and is one of the reasons the “new atheists,” including British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, PhD, and neuroscientist Sam Harris, PhD, want to see religion disappear.